Let’s compare Moscow and London’s track records on assassinations

Dr Frank is right to contest Mike Pirsch’s claims that cold war-era chemical warfare experiments in Britain and the United States could explain their involvement in the recent Salisbury poisoning attack. It’s a claim that doesn’t stand up to rational analysis. In typical conspiracy-theory style, Pirsch distorts the truth, and uses facts selectively.
I can’t speak for what happened in the US, but the tests carried out in the UK, which I am sure would be banned now under health and safety regulations, were at the time not considered to expose the public to risk. That includes what Pirsch ludicrously refers to as an “attack” on London’s Underground. It wasn’t an attack, it was a test. A substance deemed to be harmless, although later found to possibly cause some side effects, was released to test how it would spread through the Underground system. It was a prescient decision by the government, in view of the Sarin attack in Tokyo’s Underground in 1995.
In trying to more rationally figure out who actually poisoned the ex-spy and his daughter in Salisbury, it is worth noting that in 2006 the Russian parliament passed a law legalising the assassination abroad of Russian citizens considered to be enemies of the state. One year later, Alexander Litvinenko, an outspoken critic of President Putin, was fatally poisoned in London by a Russian secret agent. In recent years, many other Russian critics and opponents of the government, and enemies of President Putin, including oligarchs and journalists, have been murdered, both in Russia and abroad.
Based on the balance of probabilities, the finger of suspicion for the Salisbury attack continues to point at the Kremlin, or at those closely connected to it. The Russian government has repeatedly denied any involvement, but to paraphrase Shakespeare, “The Kremlin doth protest too much, methinks”.
Robin Grant
Bangkok